Growing Corn

Ever since the retreat this summer at Easton Mountain, I've been thinking about the totem that was retrieved for me in a partner journey exercise: corn. At the time it had absolutely no significance to me whatsoever, and I was completely mystified. I researched it, took journeys about it, found out about the Corn Mother/Corn Woman and did indeed develop my ritual with it with the help of my spirits and guides, and dutifully did it when I got home but up until today I just didn't feel very connected to it. Even though I've had a green bag of it (seen in a journey minutes before walking into a store and seeing it right in front of my eyes) hanging by my door since my trip to the mountains with my folks in the fall.

At this point in my shamanic practice I've had enough journeys now to know that sometimes the meaning is hidden from me for a while until it makes itself known, but this one I just thought might have been meant for someone else :-) since it didn't make *any* sense at all to me. I mean I have no connections in my brain to corn whatsoever. But I've kept on thinking about it and musing on it, hoping to find an answer.

Then, recently I ran across the quotation (don't know who it is by, Sun Bear maybe?) that said something like

"anybody can have visions. The good ones are the ones that grow corn".

I thought it was amusing in a sort of new-agey kind of way with a little bit of a moralistic sting to it at the end. Ha ha! Isn't that just the cleverest thing!

And then I just now came across it again in the book "Stone Age Wisdom" by Tom Crockett and a huge lightbulb went on in my head. Everything he says in this book has hit me like a ton of bricks, especially running across the saying again at the end of his book: he expresses the hope that it has helped grow corn, meaning that it has created something useful in the world. He's talking about urban shamans, forever students who never quite come out of the closet or set up shop to help people with their real healing skills, never considering themselves "ready". He urges shamanic practitioners to use what they've got and help the community and the world in the ways in which they can help, right now, today.

This is me all over; I'm never sure I'm "ready" for anything, never sure that I have all the info. I feel as if I've been hoarding my corn knowledge-kernels and never planting them.

I've been sitting on the fence, waiting at the station and never getting on the train, never joining in the game, never *doing* the big thing, although I actually do do a lot of different things. I've done one shamanic healing session for a friend which was absolutely amazing as hell and helped her (and me) a lot, but I shied away from it after that. I felt uncomfortable in my office space making drumming noises at the hospital, and I felt that it'd be generally intrusive and draw unnecessary attention. I'm in the Bible Belt, after all :-). But I think the time has come to actually come out of the shamanic closet and grow some corn. I'm also coming out of the Poly closet. And the leather closet, and probably the BDSM closet too ... I'm in the process of generally dissolving and owning my own artificial internal barriers that have been up for decades. How funny that I've waited until the age of 45 to do so.

This has been a major, major revelation to me, a huge nudge and confirmation from the universe. And a sweet, shy gay shaman from San Francisco is the one who brought it to me. He even argued with his guides about it in journey, saying that it could not possibly be the right thing to bring back, but they argued right back, and so he brought back corn to the bewilderment of us both. [Thank you, brother! I can't wait to see you when I'm there in January: we've got a lot to share and talk about :-)]

I'm involved in a lot of things in my life. Some of them are growing corn, some are not. I think I've fooled myself too many times in the past thinking that my efforts were growing good corn when, indeed, they weren't. True corn is tangible, immediately and useful in a multitude of ways, life-sustaining, beautiful, bountiful, fragrant and nourishing.

From this point, that's the only kind of corn I want to grow in this life.

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